You spend a surprising amount of your day working, sleeping — and masturbating
Spend more time toiling away at your job than you do relaxing?
Turns out you’re in the minority.
Researchers from McGill University have compiled data from 145 countries to determine what an ordinary day looks like for the average human in the 21st century — and the results may shock you.
While it’s assumed humans spend most of their waking hours hard at work, the team of academics, led by Eric Galbraith, found that most people spend a significant amount of the day enjoying themselves.
“We found that the single largest chunk of time is really focused on humans ourselves, a little more than nine hours,” Galbraith told HealthDay News on Monday. “Most of this —about 6½ hours — is doing things that we enjoy, like hanging out, watching TV, socializing and doing sports.”
Other activities in those nineish hours include more than an hour dedicated to “hygiene and grooming,” which encompasses showering, grooming, dressing and “private activities,” including sex and masturbation.
In addition to relaxation, it appears the world’s citizens are getting ample amounts of rest, spending an average of 9.1 hours per day in bed.
“That also includes time in bed and not sleeping, which can be as much as one hour per day,” Galbraith clarified.
He added that the data included studies on children’s sleeping habits, which likely pushed the figure above the nine-hour mark.
When adult smartwatch data was analyzed on its own, Galbraith claimed the sleep time decreased to 7½ hours.
For the mammoth study, researchers used data collected by national statistics agencies, international organizations and prior studies that were conducted between 2000 and 2019.
The results paint a highly generalized — but compelling — picture of human life across cultures, countries and age ranges in this century.
Given that the data included people of all ages, including children and senior citizens, it’s no surprise that the average work time was significantly less than the standard workday of eight hours.
Work — which was classified in the study as paid employment or “the production of nonmarket goods within households” — accounted for just 2.6 hours, or roughly 11% of the global human day.
However, the researchers clarified that “although this may appear small, it is equivalent to a 41-hour work week among the global labor force,” meaning the average working person clocks in more than eight hours per day if their labor is spread across five days of the week.
Elsewhere, the study determined that the average person spent just under an hour per day cooking or preparing food — including washing up — and about 48 minutes per day cleaning and maintaining their living quarters.
The researchers also found that the average human spends 12 minutes per day praying or devoting themself to other forms of “religious practice.”
Galbraith and his team claim that, at present, “we lack a coherent global understanding of human activities,” and they hope their research will start to paint a clearer picture of life in our time as it continues to evolve.
“Understanding how the global human system functions is crucial if we are to sustainably navigate planetary boundaries, adapt to rapid technological change such as artificial intelligence and achieve global development goals,” they declared.
